Tech Brew Ride Home - Fri. 05/02 – GTA 6 Delayed To 2026

Episode Date: May 2, 2025

The big cultural event of maybe the decade is going to take a little while longer to get here. Earnings from Apple and Amazon. More signs of the impending death of the password. More signs of self-driving rapidly becoming reality. And in the longreads, what happens when AI completely changes your field? The AI researchers were the first to experience it. Links: Grand Theft Auto VI release delayed to May 2026 (The Verge) Amazon Says Operating Profits May Decline Amid Economic Uncertainty (NYTimes) Microsoft goes passwordless by default on new accounts (The Verge) Temu Blocks US Shoppers From Seeing Products Shipped From China (Wired) Aurora’s driverless trucks are making deliveries in Texas (The Verge) Weekend Longreads Suggestions: When ChatGPT Broke an Entire Field: An Oral History (Quanta Magazine) The Life of the Most-Used Citi Bike in New York City (Bloomberg) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On April 4th, 2023, around 2 in the morning, a man was found stabbed multiple times on a sidewalk in downtown San Francisco. Hey, who did this to you? What happened next turned the story into a political firestorm. Reports have identified the victim as Bob Lee, the founder of Cash App. From Bloomberg Podcasts, this is Foundering, the Killing of Bob Lee, beginning April 16. Welcome to the Tech meme right home for Friday, May 2nd, 2025. I'm Brian McCullough today. The big cultural event of maybe the decade is going to take a little while longer to get here. Earnings from Apple and Amazon, more signs of the impending death of the password, more signs of

self-driving, rapidly becoming reality, and in the long reads, what happens when AI completely changes your field? AI researchers were the first to experience that. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. Rockstar Games has delayed the release of Grand Theft Auto 6. from what was expected to be this fall to May 26, 2026, saying it needs extra time to deliver the expected quality. I said all year that this launch would be the cultural event of the year by far, and now, quoting the verge. In a message posted on the Rockstar Games website, the development team apologized for the delay. We are very sorry that this is later than you expected. The interest and excitement surrounding a new Grand Theft Auto has been truly humbling for our entire team.

We want to thank you for your support and your patience as we work to finish the game. With every game we have released, the goal has always been to try and exceed your expectations, and Grand Theft Auto 6 is no exception. We hope you understand that we need this extra time to deliver at the level of quality you expect and deserve. We look forward to sharing more information with you soon, end quote. And quoting Bloomberg. Rockstar Games, the studio behind the hit, has revealed little about GTA6 aside from a teaser trailer for the game in late 2023, The trailer, which has topped 200 million views on YouTube, shows the game is set in a fictional version of Miami.

The game, which has already missed multiple deadlines, was expected to be the biggest release of 2025 and one of the most lucrative games ever, end quote. And quoting Reuters. The previous entry, Grand Theft Auto 5, released in 2013, has sold more than 200 million copies, making it one of the best-selling video games of all time. The delay now pushes the game out of Take 2's fiscal 2026 release window. and into 2027, which will likely bring down booking expectations for the next fiscal year. GTA6 was also expected to be a major driver of overall video game industry growth this year, after the market underwent a downturn following pandemic highs, end quote. Revenue Roundup to the tune of Mystery Science Theater's robot roll call.

Apple reported Q2 revenue up 5% year-on-year, but China sales were down 2% year-on-year. On its conference call, Apple said that a majority of iPhones sold in the U.S. in Q3 will come from India, while nearly all of its other devices will come from Vietnam. They also planned to source more than 19 billion chips from the U.S. this year, including from TSM's expanding Arizona facilities, as it seeks to lessen its reliance on China. They also reported Q2 revenue from services, which includes the App Store, Apple TV Plus, and Apple Music, up 12 percent year-on-year to 26.65 billion. a new record, but below the $26.7 billion estimated. And Tim Cook said that the company estimates tariffs will add $900 million in costs in its Q3, assuming current tariff rates and policies do not change. Amazon reported Q1 revenue up 9% year-on-year,

operating income up 20% year-on-year to $18.4 billion, but, crucially, forecast Q2 operating income below estimates. quoting the times. Amazon told investors to expect sales of $159 billion to $164 billion and for operating profits to shrink to as low as $13 billion. Amazon added tariff and trade policies to the list of factors it says can make its forecasts uncertain. The results were mixed compared with Wall Street's expectations. Amazon's stock price was down more than 3% in aftermarket trading following the earnings release. Obviously, none of us know exactly where tariffs will settle or when. Andy Jassy, the chief executive, executive of Amazon said on a call with investors. He said the company is pretty maniacally focused on keeping prices down by purchasing extra inventory in advance of tariffs and will be helping

sellers on Amazon's marketplace do the same, end quote. Microsoft says all new accounts will be passwordless by default, asking people to use more secure methods like pass keys, push notifications, and security keys. Quoting the verge, the new no password initiative by Microsoft is accompanied by its recently launched optimized sign-in window design with reordered steps that flow better for a passwordless and pass-key-first experience. Although current accounts won't have to shed their passwords, new ones will try and leave them behind by not prompting you to create a password at all. As part of this simplified U.S., we're changing the default behavior for new accounts. Brand-new Microsoft accounts will now be passwordless by default. New users will have several

password-list options for signing into their account and they'll never need to enroll a password. Existing users can visit their account settings to delete their password. With today's changes, Microsoft is renaming World Password Day to World Pass Key Day instead and pledging to continue to work implementing pass keys over the coming year. This time last year, the company implemented Pass Keys into consumer accounts. Microsoft says it's seeing nearly a million pass keys registered every day and that past key users have a 98% success rate of signing in versus 32% for password-based accounts, end quote. Tamu appears to have removed all products in the U.S. version of its online store that ship directly

from China to U.S. consumers, confusing suppliers and customers alike, quoting Wired. The change seemingly happened earlier this week, just days before a trade loophole that allows American consumers to buy products from China without paying tariffs is set to disappear as part of sweeping new import duties imposed by U.S. President Donald Trump. Over the past week, Temu has rolled out a number of whirlwind changes to its platform as it grappled with the impacts of Trump's trade war on its U.S. business, which is built over the past three years by offering products at astonishingly low prices and promoting itself as a haven for bargain lovers. First, Temu announced that it would begin raising prices on products shipped from China,

starting on April 25th, but then things got a lot more confusing. Soon afterward, Temu began displaying a separate import charge on orders from U.S. customers, seemingly as part of an effort to emphasize the financial impacts of the tariffs. Other retailers have also adopted the tactic, but it has drawn harsh criticism from Trump. By Tuesday, U.S. shoppers realized that Temu had apparently decided to simply block U.S. users from seeing any product listings for items currently located in China or anywhere else outside the U.S. The version of Temu's website and app for the United States now appears entirely filled with products marked with a local label, meaning they are exempt from tariffs because they were shipped

into the country before the new import duties went into effect. Prior to this week, consumers had the ability to choose between products with the local label and those without it, the latter of which are typically shipped from China via air cargo after a purchase is made. Things are in chaos right now. Ever since the tariffs kept changing, our business has been heavily affected, says a Tamu seller in China who specializes in furniture and home decor and asks to remain anonymous for privacy reasons. Temu has recently transitioned its U.S. operations to a local fulfillment model. This means that all sales in the U.S. are now handled by locally based sellers, with orders fulfilled from within the country. An emailed statement from Temu said, confirming that the platform is

cutting its ship from China strategy. Despite the operational shift, Tamu's pricing for U.S. consumers remains unchanged, the statement also said. The shift has brought Temu closer in line with what consumers can expect from competitors like Amazon, says Josas, Quainus, an independent e-commerce industry analyst. Today, Temu looks a lot like Amazon, because everything you buy on Temu today will come to you from their warehouse in the U.S. and probably in just a few days, he says. It also means that many U.S. shoppers are suddenly faced with a much narrower selection of goods on Temu, and they are not happy about it. On social media sites like Reddit, users have reported seeing hundreds of products they saved on wish lists and

in their shopping carts suddenly become sold out overnight, end quote. From the waking up to a self-driving world file, Aurora has launched its commercial driverless trucking service, making deliveries between Dallas and Houston, and with plans to expand to El Paso and Phoenix this year. Now, self-driving trucks on highways was something I felt would become more of a reality long before this as the problem to solve, I thought was easier, right? But nonetheless, quoting the verge. After years of testing and validation, Aurora says its first fully autonomous tractor trailers are operating on public highways in Texas. The company's class eight trucks are now making customer deliveries between Dallas and Houston, having already

completed 1,200 miles without a driver, Aurora said. The clients for these initial trips are Uber freight, the ride-hailing company's trucking brokerage, and Hirschbach Motor Lines, a carrier that delivers time and temperature-sensitive freight. Aurora's CEO Chris Irmson said he rode in the backseat during the first truck's inaugural ride, which he called the honor of a lifetime. We founded Aurora to deliver the benefits of self-driving technology safely, quickly, and broadly, Ermson said in a statement, now we are the first company to successfully and safely operate a commercial driverless trucking service on public roads. Aurora said it plans to expand its driverless service to El Paso and Phoenix by the end of 2025. Driverless trucks were once expected to

precede robotaxies and personally owned autonomous vehicles in mass adoption, considering that highways are vastly less complex than city and residential streets. But self-driving truck operators have run into hurdles involving the technology and regulation that have delayed their public debut. Some companies like Embark trucks, Too Simple and Locomation have gone out of business, while others have cut plans to deploy driverless trucks as timelines have stretched into the future, and funding has dried up. Moreover, public opinion toward autonomous vehicles has trended downward, thanks in part to missteps from companies like Tesla and Cruise. But like Waymo, Aurora has placed its hopes on a measured, conservative approach to commercialization, as well as an emphasis on safety.

Founded in 2017 by alumni of Uber, Tesla, and Waymo, Aurora had planned to deploy its fully autonomous trucks in 2024, but those plans got delayed until this year, with the company continuing to tweak its autonomous system for surface street driving and construction sites. Aurora says its technology presents a possible solution to the challenges currently facing the trucking industry, such as a trucker shortage, high turnover rates, and increasingly expensive operating costs. The company says its system can address these specific problems while also reducing labor costs and heightening safety on the highway.

Aurora has spent four years conducting supervised pilot halls, mostly in Texas, where it delivered over 10,000 customer loads across 3 million autonomous miles. The company says it has also demonstrated capabilities such as predicting red light runners, avoiding collisions, and detecting pedestrians in the dark hundreds of meters away, and it has forged partnerships with a bunch of leading players in the trucking industry, including Continental, Volvo, Uber, and others. The need to start charging customers for deliveries is, evident if you look at Aurora's earnings. In its most recent report, the company reported a net loss of

$748 million for 2024 down from $796 million the previous year. While the loss decreased, Aurora's revenue estimates have declined. Aurora expects to report its first quarter earnings on May 8th, end quote. Time for the weekend long-rate suggestions. And first up, what happens when AI upends an entire field? Where do the experts go? What do young people do? Researchers studying net language processing were among the very first to find out. This oral history from Quanta looks at how LLMs and ChatGPT completely changed the field over the last five or so years. Quote, this is Christopher Callison Burch. It's an oral history, remember? I got early access to the GPT3 beta and was actually playing with it myself. I'm trying out all these things that my

recent PhD students had done as their dissertations and just realizing, oh my God, the thing that had taken a student five years. Seems like I could reproduce that in a month. All these classical NLP tasks, many of which I had touched on or actively researched throughout my career, just felt like they worked in one shot, like done. And that was just really, really shocking. I sometimes describe it as having this career existential crisis. This is Vecusi Maravate, quote, I don't know how many tutorials I gave on LLMs in 2023. On one hand, you've been trying to talk to people for years and say, there's interesting stuff that's happening here. Then all of a sudden, it's just a complete waterfall of, come explain this to us. Sam Bowman. It goes from a

relatively sleepy field to suddenly, I'm having lunch with people who were meeting with the Pope and the president in the same month. Emily M. Bender. Between January and June, I counted five workdays with no media contact. It was nonstop. Is Beltega? There is a point where you realize that in order to continue advancing the field, you need to build these huge expensive artifacts like the large Hadron Collider. You can't advance experimental physics without something like this. I was lucky to be at AI2, which generally has more resources than most academic labs. ChatGPT made it clear that there's a huge gap between OpenAI and everybody else. So right after, we started thinking about ways we can build these things from scratch. And this is exactly what happened, end quote. And then from Bloomberg,

The Life of the Most Used City Bike in New York City. City bike, that's our ride-sharing bike service here in the city. Quote, City bike number 3-2606 was born on October 15th, 2017 at 1108 a.m. Its first journey began at 3rd Street and Prespect Park West in Park Slope, Brooklyn, on a glorious 70-degree mid-October day. The ride ended at Grand Army Plaza 28 minutes later, barely a half mile away. The rider was not a city bike. member, so I suspect a tourist used the weather as an excuse to take a leisurely ride around Prospect Park. The leaves were probably just starting to change. Over its 806 days of service, about two years and two months, city bike number 3-2606 was ridden 8,6004 times, or an average of

10 times per day. This makes Citibike 3-2606 the most used traditional bike we know of in the public dataset as of 2020. In 2020, CityBike stopped publishing the unique bike identity for each trip taken. E-bikes are excluded from this data. As the crow flies, the total distance covered was more than 7,000 miles, but this is an underestimate of how far City Bike 3-2606 actually traveled, because the data only tells us where the bikes docked, not their on-street routes. Still, that 7,000 miles would be enough to go from Times Square to the Santa Monica Pier in Los Angeles and back again, plus a final jaunt up to Burlington, Vermont. City Bike 3-2606 did that distance just on New York City's streets, and every single one of those 7,000-plus miles was powered by human legs.

We know some other things about Citibike 3-2606 and its humans from the data. The median age of its rider was 37 years old. The youngest, or at least the youngest rider to legally unlock the bike from a dock, was a series of 16-year-olds on four separate occasions, and the oldest was 85 years young. After 8,623 trips, the bike's final recorded ride was on December 28, 2019, a short hop through the lower east side for three blocks. It took a hair over two minutes. It would have been a six-minute walk, but 32606's last act was still a noble one. It saved someone a couple of minutes, end quote. One weekend bonus episode for you this weekend, an omnibus episode,

reminder that if you sign up for a ride home plus membership at tech.combe.combe, along with ad-free versions of every daily show you get ad-free versions of the weekly omnibus episodes, perfect for catching up on a week's worth of news all in one go. Tech.supercast.tech. Talk to you on Monday.